Hello, Molly!: A Memoir

By Molly Shannon and Sean Wilsey

A New York Times bestseller

A candid, compulsively readable, hilarious, and heartbreaking memoir of resilience and redemption by comedic genius Molly Shannon

At age four, Molly Shannon’s world was shattered when she lost her mother, baby sister, and cousin in a car accident with her father at the wheel. Held together by her tender and complicated relationship with her grieving father, Molly was raised in a permissive household where her gift for improvising and role-playing blossomed alongside the fearlessness that would lead her to become a celebrated actress.

From there, Molly ventured into the wider world of New York and Los Angeles show business, where she created her own opportunities and developed her daring and empathetic comedy. Filled with behind-the-scenes stories involving everyone from Whitney Houston to Adam Sandler to Monica Lewinsky, many told for the first time here, Hello, Molly! spans Molly’s time on Saturday Night Live—where she starred alongside Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Cheri Oteri, Tracy Morgan, and Jimmy Fallon, among many others. At the same time, it explores with humor and candor her struggle to come to terms with the legacy of her father, a man who both fostered her gifts and drive and was left with the impossible task of raising his kids alone after the loss of her mother.

Witty, winning, and told with tremendous energy and heart, Hello, Molly!, written with Sean Wilsey, sheds new and revelatory light on the life and work of one of our most talented and free-spirited performers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9780063056251

Molly Shannon

MOLLY SHANNON is an actress and comedian. She spent six seasons as a member of the repertory company on Saturday Night Live, primarily known for the eclectic characters she created, such as Mary Katherine Gallagher and Sally O’Malley. In 2000, she received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program. In 2013, Molly received her second Emmy nomi­nation for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her work in Enlightened and again in 2018 for her portrayal of Val in NBC’s award-winning comedy Will & Grace. In 2017, she was awarded the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the highly acclaimed drama Other People, written and directed by SNL head writer Chris Kelly. She was most recently seen in the Academy Award–nominated crime drama Promising Young Woman and will soon reprise her lauded performance on the critically acclaimed comedy The Other Two. Molly was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio. She earned a BFA in drama from New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. She currently lives in California with her husband and two children.

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Author Note

Prologue: The Accident

Part One: Ohio

Chapter 1: Bad Girl

Chapter 2: My Sister Mary and My Best Friend (and Replacement for Katie) Ann

Chapter 3: My Dad: Mama Rose to My Gypsy Rose

Chapter 4: Hopping the Plane

Chapter 5: Love and Drunks

Chapter 6: Swimming to Juvie

Chapter 7: The Lullaby of Broadway

Chapter 8: Leaving

Part Two: Freedom

Chapter 9: Drama School

Chapter 10: The Birth of Mary Katherine Gallagher

Chapter 11: The Mamet Scam

Chapter 12: Comedy Is King

Chapter 13: SNL

Part Three: Baby, This Is It

Chapter 14: Showing Them

Chapter 15: Team Shannon

Chapter 16: Studio 8H

Chapter 17: Superstar and Fritz

Part Four: Good Endings

Chapter 18: Leaving SNL

Chapter 19: My Mom

Chapter 20: Coming Out

Chapter 21: Small Parts

Chapter 22: Motherhood

Acknowledgments

Photo Section

About the Author

Also by Molly Shannon

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author Note

THE EVENTS AND EXPERIENCES DETAILED HERE ARE ALL true and have been faithfully rendered as I remember them, to the best of my ability. In certain scenes the names and identifying details of the people and places involved have been changed for privacy’s sake.

Though conversations come from my keen recollection of them, they are not written to represent word-for-word documentation; rather, I’ve retold them in a way that evokes the real feeling and meaning of what was said, in keeping with the mood and spirit of the event.

Prologue: The Accident

WHEN I WAS FOUR, I LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW OF my family’s two-story house in Cleveland, Ohio, and saw a little girl on a tricycle. I was in the downstairs den, and the feeling was very peaceful. My mother was folding clothes.

I remember looking at the girl and thinking, I really want to become friends with her.

So I asked my mom, How do you do that? How can I go up to her?

She said, All you have to do is go up, and say, ‘I’m Molly,’ and introduce yourself. I think you’re going to have a lot of friends, because you seem like the type of person who could do that.

ON SUNDAY, JUNE 1, 1969, my mom and dad, my sisters, Mary and Katie, and I drove from our house to Mansfield, a city halfway between Cleveland and Columbus, for one of my cousins’ high school graduation parties. Everyone was drinking. My dad had been working as a salesman for GM, bartering steel. He felt like he was in over his head and he was stressed-out. (My mom, who worked as a librarian at Woodland elementary school, would tell him, Jim, you hate the job. Leave it and find something else!)

At one point during the day his sister Bernadette—Aunt Bernie—told him he’d probably had enough to drink. Jim, that’s enough, she said. Watch it. Cut yourself off now. She tapped him on the chest with her fist for emphasis. Be careful.

Later that afternoon, he took a nap. It was an all-day party into the evening.

It was nine at night when we finally left Mansfield, and we were two hours from our house. My mom said to Aunt Bernie, whose twenty-five-year-old daughter, Fran, was getting a ride with us, Ugh, it’s going to be a rough ride home.

Everybody came out of the party, laughing, to see us off. I fell asleep as they said their goodbyes. Years later my dad told me he’d asked my mom and Fran to drive because he was still feeling tired, and they’d said, No, you’re fine; you can drive. He asked my mom to talk to him on the ride to keep him awake.

My big sister Mary and I were in the very back of the station wagon; she was six and I was four. And our baby sister, Katie, who was only three, sat in the middle with our cousin Fran. My mom was in the front on the passenger side, and my dad was at the wheel. I remember my dad was a little bit irritated that he had to go out of his way to take Fran home. He wasn’t used to going that way on the freeway. It made him nervous.

I know what happened next because as an adult my sister Mary contacted the man who’d been driving behind us. Mary was so brave to just call him on the phone one day. This man was now old and hesitant to answer her questions, but eventually he said that my dad sideswiped a car to the left, then suddenly swerved hard to the right and hit a light pole head-on. These days all light poles are breakaway poles, designed to topple on impact, but at the time they had these solid steel poles that caused terrible injuries. We smashed into a pole like that. He’d driven for ninety minutes and we were almost home.

My dad said that before he hit the pole he turned his head for just a second to ask Fran which way was the quickest, when I felt just the slightest tap of the bumper in front of me. It was a new company car, and I remember thinking about all the paperwork I was going to have to fill out because of that one little tap. And that was it. I remember nothing after that. He blacked out.

The car was mangled badly on impact. So many people stopped to help. Firemen were called to put out the small, smoldering fire in front of the car. Another man passed the scene of the accident and stopped. By coincidence this man worked for Fran’s father, my uncle John, in the car wash he owned. And he was the last person to speak with my mother.

She was lying on the ground beside our car and she asked him, Where are my girls? She wanted to gather her three little girls and she couldn’t. I think her heart must have broken in that moment. And those were her final words. It was so strange and unlikely that someone who knew our family happened to be driving on that empty highway at the same time, enabling me to find out that my mother’s last thoughts had been of Katie, Mary, and me. She died two hours later in the hospital.

My baby sister, Katie, and cousin Fran were killed instantly. Since Mary and I were in the very back, we just had a concussion and a broken arm, respectively. Katie was buried in the middle of all the wreckage. She was so small, they didn’t even know that she was in the car. Officially she died of contusions and pulpefaction of brain. I found that out as an adult when I went through my dad’s filing cabinet after he died and I saw her death certificate. He’d kept this horror to himself for the rest of his life.

For so many years there was this big secret hidden in that filing cabinet.

My poor, sweet Katie, I thought. And my dad knew this. He just buried it away. I imagine he must have looked at it once and never wanted to look at it again.

There is no way to know exactly what happened that night, though my gut tells me he fell asleep at the wheel. But would he have fallen asleep without the drinking? It still keeps me up at night sometimes but, in the end, all that is relevant is that it changed our lives forever.

MY SISTER MARY WAS the only one who was conscious when the police arrived, so they questioned her. They asked her who’d been in the car. She had to tell them everyone’s ages and where we had been. They kept saying over and over again how shocked they were at how articulate she was for a six-year-old.

When I came to, there were sirens and lots of people. I remember feeling Mary’s body next to mine, our legs touching each other’s, on a stretcher. And I remember being covered in a blanket that was really itchy. They took us to the hospital and they cut our clothes off. And they gave us tests.

Voices asked, Are the lights on or are the lights off? Do you feel that? Do you feel that? All these tests. And then they put us in a kids’ ward.

I was doing really well with potty training. I had learned how not to wet myself during the night. But now I had to go to the bathroom. I shouted, I have to go to the bathroom! I have to go to the bathroom! I was trying so hard to hold it. I had training underpants on, and I started pleading, I want my mommy! I want my mommy!

Nobody came. So I just gave up and wet myself. I was despairing. I didn’t know what was going on, only that everything was so dark and horrible. So even though I knew not to wet myself, I just gave up and did it anyway.

The next morning I remember waking up in the hospital, my arm in a sling. Mary was in the corner next to a large window. I was in a bed next to her, four feet away. It was a gray day. Mary remembers asking repeatedly, Where is my mom? I want my mom! But no one would answer her. I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept my eyes on Mary, in order to follow what she was doing. She would be my guidepost. Whatever she did, I would do. But she just stared out the window and sobbed and sobbed. Then I looked around and saw all these other kids. Some were in wheelchairs. Many of them were alone, and I thought, Oh. Wow. Well, I don’t know where my parents are, but these kids have it worse than me. They don’t even have anybody visiting. I looked around. And he doesn’t have a leg, and this kid only has one arm. I felt like Curious George when he went to the hospital.

I decided that I would take care of those kids. Since nobody would tell me what was going on, this was something I could do while I was waiting. And once I started helping them, it really cheered me up. I introduced myself and talked to them. And soon I was in a circle and getting everyone to play games.

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS we had a lot of visitors. People would bring us toys in the hospital, hand them to us in our beds, and try to act really cheerful. More toys and dolls than any child could ever imagine. Every day after our nap, we would wake up surrounded by even more of them. But it was not great getting all these toys.

All I could think was Sad bed. Sad toys. Where is my mom? Where is Katie? Where is my dad? Then I thought, Katie must be with the other little babies in the baby section. And my mom must be with Katie and the other babies, and now I need to go see them.

There were double doors at the top of a ramp leading out of our ward. They wouldn’t let me go through those doors. But I needed to go out. To me it was nonnegotiable. Up the ramp, through the double doors—that’s where Katie and my mom must be. So I got dressed, told the nurses, I really need to see them, and started up the ramp.

A nurse said, No, no, no, you can’t do that, and gently brought me back to bed. My relatives didn’t want to tell me what had happened. They knew they had to tell me but they didn’t know how. I obviously wanted answers so they were forced into it. Finally, one of my aunts said, I’m so sorry, Molly. Your mother and your sister Katie have gone to heaven.

I said, Can we go visit them?

They said, "No. No. They’re in heaven," like it was a really good thing. They’ve gone to heaven.

The fact that they were in heaven—this place that we couldn’t even visit—was supposed to be good news? Heaven seemed confusing.

Well, can we fly there? Can we hop on a plane? Can we take a hot-air balloon? I just figured there had to be some way to get there.

But they repeated, No. No.

And I remember thinking, There’s got to be a way. This is unacceptable!

I didn’t understand what was happening, so I went into a fantasy waiting for them to come back. It was impossible for me to think, They’re just dead. It would have annihilated me. I had to go into a fantasy, so I just thought, Oh, well, maybe when I get back to the house my mom is gonna be around the corner and she will pop out and surprise me or she will be over there or over there. She must be somewhere.

I really could not accept it. I didn’t know what death was. I just wondered, Why did Mommy and Katie leave without me? I thought that my mom loved me, but now she’s gone with Katie, so maybe that was all fake. Maybe she didn’t really love me. Maybe I’m bad. Oh, I really wish I could see them! That’s how a kid of four’s brain works. There was no way I could understand or accept they were not coming back.

My whole life changed in an instant.

BUT OUR DAD WAS ALIVE. After a bit of debate amongst the relatives—Should we have Mary and Molly go see their dad?—they decided to take us to see him. They thought it would be good for us. They brought us to his room with a bunch of aunts. My dad was the youngest of ten kids. A crowd of siblings stood around his bed. A mountain of cards and letters from friends was on the table beside him. He had a hole cut into his throat so he could breathe and his legs were hanging up in chains. The impact with the pole had been head-on, ramming the station wagon’s engine into his lap and collapsing his chest. His legs had been pounded straight into the engine, too, so they’d had to break the whole front of the car apart to pull him out. Had he been in a smaller hospital, they would have just amputated his legs. That’s how terrible it was. And his teeth were all knocked out.

He got so excited when he saw us that he tried to stick his hand into the hole in his throat so he could talk—but it got tangled in all these tubes, and then he was overwhelmed with emotion, seeing we were alive, and he started crying. It was terrifying.

My dad’s best friend, Bill O’Neill, had rushed to the hospital on the night of the accident. When he saw him, he said, "That’s not Jim Shannon!" They’d known each other since eighth grade, but my dad had such a swollen head from the impact that he was unrecognizable. The doctors didn’t know if he was going to live. He’d been on the verge of being pronounced dead at the hospital. It was his orthopedic surgeon who’d had to tell my father, who was under heavy sedation, that my mom, Katie, and Fran had been killed.

And my dad shook his head and just said, No, no, no, his body sinking into the bed.

Years later my dad told me that when he was in the hospital he dreamed he was floating up in the corner of a big room where there was a cocktail party. He was way up at the top, and his toe started dipping down. And he thought, Oh, I can’t let my toe even touch that cocktail party, because that’s a Death Cocktail Party. So he was trying to hold himself up but he kept slipping and thinking DON’T let your toe even touch, because if your toe touches, it’s DEATH.

MARY REMEMBERS THAT WHEN we left the hospital a priest brought us into a little dark room, maybe the hospital chapel, and told her, There was a terrible accident and your mom and sister died. They are in heaven. Then he told six-year-old Mary, You have to be kind of like the mom now.

Part One

Ohio

Chapter 1

Bad Girl

I WENT TO A NUN/PSYCHIATRIST WHO ASKED ME TO DRAW A picture of my family. I drew a picture where my dad had really long arms and all of the women had chopped-off arms.

She asked, Why don’t the women have arms?

I said, Oh, I don’t know.

I’m sure if somebody analyzed the drawing enough, everything would start to fit together.

MY SISTER AND I stayed in the hospital for a while, because nobody knew where we were going to live while our dad recuperated. Different relatives were fighting over who was going to take us.

We ended up going to my aunt Bernie’s house. She was grieving because she had lost Fran, her daughter, but she took Mary and me in, and then my dad ended up getting out of the hospital a few months later and coming to live with his sister and her husband, my uncle John. My dad slept in their dining room. They put a hospital bed and bed pans in there. He had to relearn how to walk with a walker. He would practice walking slowly around their living room. It took him another year to rehabilitate. And he would always need a leg brace. When I got older I’d sometimes feel impatient at how slow he was. Ugh, I’d think, I wish he could walk faster, and just normally. I’d want to jump into his arms and sit in his lap but I had to be very careful. I could hurt him.

So we lived at my aunt’s house and I went to kindergarten in their neighborhood.

One time, Aunt Bernie caught me downstairs. I had started making up little masturbation scenarios and my games were character-driven. I had tied myself to a chair with a jump rope and was acting out a fantasy about a mean, very critical, lady gym teacher who barked, Get down on the mat! Do twenty push-ups—now!

I then said, Ugh! and had to get out of the chair.

I played both roles. I stuffed my pants with clothes so I could touch myself without touching myself, using the fabric as a little layer of fat/insulation, and, pretending to be the gym teacher, yelled, Time to get out of the chair, Fattie!

I remember Aunt Bernie came down, saw this scene, and was so disturbed. She was obviously thinking, What the fuck is going on with this little four-and-a-half-year-old? She looked horrified. She didn’t know how to handle it. She turned right around and pretended she hadn’t seen anything.

THE PRIEST AT ST. Dominic School, Father Murray, was the first person who acknowledged how sad I was. He knelt down after mass one day, held my hands, looked into my eyes, and said with his thick Irish brogue, Molly. I know you lost your mother. That’s very sad. That’s very hard. You lost your sister, Katie. You lost your cousin. So sad, so hard for you. God bless you.

I thought to myself, Oh my God, I’m in love. I think I love Father Murray. He’s really handsome. He has big, thick eyebrows and a kind face. Wow. This is serious. He’s handsome and he understands me in a deep way. He was my first crush.

Nobody else knew how to talk to kids. I imagined adults having conversations with each other, saying, Just don’t talk about it! Don’t bring that up! It’ll make her too sad. I couldn’t expect them to know how deep the ache felt. Father Murray understood and I loved him for it.

WHILE LIVING AT AUNT BERNIE’S, I was walking down the street with my cousin, Jack, her teenage son. Jack was a really good artist, eccentric and daring and fun—and also grieving his sister.

A teenage girl drove up in a baby-blue convertible. She was sexy and sucking on a lollipop.

She stopped, looked at Jack, and asked him, Want a lollipop? Want a lick? Want to come with me?

Jack just said, Yeah.

She lured him into the car with her lollipop. He hopped in and they drove away, really fast. It was terrifying—all mixed up in my mind with my mom and my sister being gone so suddenly. I was convinced she’d stolen him away. I just thought, He is never, ever, ever gonna come back!

I ran to my aunt in hysterics.

Aunt Bernie told me, "Oh, no, I think he’ll be back."

I didn’t believe her. I thought that when people went away they never came back.

KATIE HAD FOLLOWED ME around everywhere I went. She would imitate me and do whatever I told her to do. When we played house my name was always Marge. And her name was always Marge, too.

We’re going to the store. What is your name going to be, Katie?

Marge, she’d answer seriously, in her three-year-old voice.

Get my purse, Marge, I’d say.

When our parents drove us to school, I would point out imaginary dragons to Katie. We pretended the Pegasus on the Mobil gas signs was one, and we would duck down in the car so that it couldn’t get us. So we’d be safe.

Now I went grocery shopping with my aunt Bernie every week. She would bend down and tie my shoes and try to teach me the knots, and I’d feel this ache in my heart. I thought, Katie should be learning how to tie her shoes, too! She should be here. She’s missing all this fun stuff. She would have loved this!

I would clench my fists and say, That’s not fair! Katie should be learning to tie her shoes!

My aunt would make me sandwiches and I would wrinkle up my nose at her because she didn’t cut the crusts off, the way my mom had done. I wanted her to do things exactly as my mom had. It upset me that she didn’t. I felt that I wasn’t coming home to the life that I’d left.

I would plead, "No! Mommy always cuts the crusts off!"

She would just patiently say, "Show me exactly how your mom does it."

SEPTEMBER CAME. KINDERGARTEN STARTED. I felt like I had been through a war.

On the first day of school, I was outside

Reviews for Hello, Molly!

[alanna1122 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There is a lot to love about Molly Shannon's memoir. She has had a life full of tragedy and difficulties but really persevered in spite of all that. She is funny and tells great stories. She definitely is a little skewed from the mainstream in her thinking sometimes, but I was mostly charmed and inspired by her.

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Shannon shows herself to be a good Irish Catholic girl with a charming Irish Catholic alcoholic father. She possesses 3 qualities I'll never have - optimism, extroversion, and the ability to forgive. I've never really forgiven the charming alcoholics in my family yet she, who has much more to forgive, adores her father. She's also driven and competent like Heather Gay (who wrote Bad Mormon) but not so driven financially. You can believe she loves her family. You can believe she lives a real life, not a plastic one

[bookwyrmm_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Any fan of SNL in the 90s will appreciate this fun memoir (but, be warned, it starts off very sad).